Representing Online Handwriting for Recognition in Large Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fadeeva, Anastasiia, Schlattner, Philippe, Maksai, Andrii, Collier, Mark, Kokiopoulou, Efi, Berent, Jesse, Musat, Claudiu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fadeeva, Anastasiia
Schlattner, Philippe
Maksai, Andrii
Collier, Mark
Kokiopoulou, Efi
Berent, Jesse
Musat, Claudiu
author_facet Fadeeva, Anastasiia
Schlattner, Philippe
Maksai, Andrii
Collier, Mark
Kokiopoulou, Efi
Berent, Jesse
Musat, Claudiu
contents The adoption of tablets with touchscreens and styluses is increasing, and a key feature is converting handwriting to text, enabling search, indexing, and AI assistance. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) are now the go-to solution for image understanding, thanks to both their state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks and the simplicity of a unified approach to training, fine-tuning, and inference. While VLMs obtain high performance on image-based tasks, they perform poorly on handwriting recognition when applied naively, i.e., by rendering handwriting as an image and performing optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we study online handwriting recognition with VLMs, going beyond naive OCR. We propose a novel tokenized representation of digital ink (online handwriting) that includes both a time-ordered sequence of strokes as text, and as image. We show that this representation yields results comparable to or better than state-of-the-art online handwriting recognizers. Wide applicability is shown through results with two different VLM families, on multiple public datasets. Our approach can be applied to off-the-shelf VLMs, does not require any changes in their architecture, and can be used in both fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning. We perform a detailed ablation study to identify the key elements of the proposed representation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15307
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Representing Online Handwriting for Recognition in Large Vision-Language Models
Fadeeva, Anastasiia
Schlattner, Philippe
Maksai, Andrii
Collier, Mark
Kokiopoulou, Efi
Berent, Jesse
Musat, Claudiu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The adoption of tablets with touchscreens and styluses is increasing, and a key feature is converting handwriting to text, enabling search, indexing, and AI assistance. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) are now the go-to solution for image understanding, thanks to both their state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks and the simplicity of a unified approach to training, fine-tuning, and inference. While VLMs obtain high performance on image-based tasks, they perform poorly on handwriting recognition when applied naively, i.e., by rendering handwriting as an image and performing optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we study online handwriting recognition with VLMs, going beyond naive OCR. We propose a novel tokenized representation of digital ink (online handwriting) that includes both a time-ordered sequence of strokes as text, and as image. We show that this representation yields results comparable to or better than state-of-the-art online handwriting recognizers. Wide applicability is shown through results with two different VLM families, on multiple public datasets. Our approach can be applied to off-the-shelf VLMs, does not require any changes in their architecture, and can be used in both fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning. We perform a detailed ablation study to identify the key elements of the proposed representation.
title Representing Online Handwriting for Recognition in Large Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15307